As this is asked to me many times, I will explain it to you one more time and I make a sticky of it.

To gain access to root privileged tasks, you need to be registered as "normal user" in the sudoers file. This post explains how to do that.

Open up the "Terminal" program from the Menu and issue the following codes:

give root password (you will be logged in as root now), then edit the sudoers file with a text editor:

then add your own username under root and copy it like it is:

CTRL-x and y to save.

That's all there is to it.

Besides, command "visudo" still working just fine, and it will open sudoers in nano as well.

Thanks, this resolved a problem I had. I did a successful install of MinPPC 9.3 on my powerbook G4, but when I tried to open preferences panels, I was unable to authorize. I thought it was asking for the root password, but actually, once I added myself to the sudoers file as above, I was then able top open preferences using my own password.

I am having trouble following your directions. can you help please.

what do you mean?
then add your own username under root and copy it like it is:

do I have to type in my username? if so, where do I tuype it? there is no mention of the word userame on the page.

I typed in su and then i typed in my password. after that I am stumped because what you describe and what shows up on the page dont make sense.
help, please

jeroen is my username in the example. Just copy it and replace jeroen by your username.

Extreme Newbie here:
PowerPC 7450, altivec supported (800.00MHz)
Memory 771MB (94MB used)
Operating System Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.6

First problem was I could not get into Users-Admin control panel using GUI, modified Su as recommended above, so I now longer get rejected into users-admin, but it fails to launch. If I go into terminal and use:

gksudo users-admin

I get the following message:

GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; the most common cause is a missing or misconfigured D-Bus session bus daemon. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details - 1: Failed to get connection to session: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken



The above error message repeats itself about 5 times, then gives the following messages:



users-admin:3181): Liboobs-WARNING **: There was an unknown error communicating asynchronously with the backends: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

(users-admin:3181): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_unref: assertion `G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

(users-admin:3181): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_unref: assertion `G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

Help will be truly appreciated